rrohbeck writes: "The New York Times has a story on what Blue Origin, [Amazon.com founder] Jeff Bezos' space company is up to after his Texas land grab. A couple of Flash videos show a short successful test hop of the "Goddard" test vehicle.

The Goddard has a science-fiction sleekness. Videos show the craft taking off and landing again with a loud whooshing sound. In one view, one of the nine rocket nozzles jitters as it maintains the ship's attitude. Goddard resembles the DC-X, another vertical-takeoff-and-landing craft under development in the 1990s by McDonnell Douglas for the Defense Department and NASA until the government pulled the plug.

Posted
by
Cliffon Wednesday January 10, 2007 @03:30AM
from the in-the-event-of-doom dept.

LqdEngineer asks: "How many of you use or have used a Dead Man's Switch designed to perform some action if you don't check in for a certain amount of time? Recently, I decided to put one together using MySQL and some cron jobs, but I wanted to see what others have their switches set up to do in the event you fail to check in. E-mails to loved ones? Send encryption keys to friends/family? Hate mail to your boss? Has anyone ever been on the receiving end of the results of such a system?"